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Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

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981–990 of 1001 posts

Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#981

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Horse crap, a huge amount of parents genuinely believe violence is a necessity for child rearing (including frequent repetitions of "spare the rod, spoil the child") to the point that they've even pushed to bring it back into public schools! The effects of corporal punishment are small compared to the effects of molestation and physical abuse. If corporal punishment were our only "issue", we'd be much better off. I…

> The effects of corporal punishment are small compared to the effects of molestation and physical abuse. That even worse abuses such as molestation, rape, and murder exist is not a justification for corporal punishment (physical discipline), which has been shown to cause negative emotional, behavioral, and academic outcomes in children. Corporal punishment is a form of physical abuse, considering these negative outc…

> That even worse abuses such as molestation, rape, and murder exist is not a justification for corporal punishment (physical discipline)

Fortunately, that's not the argument I made.

Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#982

This comment will probably be lost but hey maybe someone will read it: We inherited a world where for many generations, men were hostile to women. It was unfair and needed rectifying. But increasingly, we fixed it by normalizing hostility to men. Overemphasis on "toxic masculinity", hyper focus on promoting outcomes for girls while doing nothing of the sort for boys. Plenty of various "Women in X" supporting each oth…

I have a similar sentiment. I remember growing up with jocks and bullies and really not identifying with the whole “group showers and snapping towels at asses” masculinity not pleasant and spent a lot of time getting beaten up or avoiding being beaten up. So at first I liked the pushback against toxic masculinity as I didn’t like jerk men. But then the concept expanded to everything. “Mansplaining” isn’t something un…

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Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#983
post #979

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is not a father's job to be the person a child goes to for emotional support. A father is indeed supposed to pass down masculinity and how to manage it and how to become a socially functional and acceptable man. Mothers on the other hand are supposed to be the primary person that provides emotional support and care. This reads like satire. "ChatGPT, please write a paragraph that embodies the concept of toxic mas…

> It's astounding to me that anyone could believe it's possible to be truly masculine while neutering one's experience of human emotion. Being too afraid of emotion to ever express it, and making your child suffer for your fear, is cowardice, not masculinity. I did not claim that fathers should be devoid of emotion or neuter their emotion. You added that strawman on your own. This is the 3rd or 4th comment in this th…

> This is the 3rd or 4th comment in this thread where someone made a similar claim.

If you believe that 4 different readers are "misunderstanding" you, perhaps the failure to communicate exists on the writer's side.

> This is basic human organizational structure. You can't have the CEO and CFO have the same exact job. You can't have two commanding officers responsible for the same subordinates in the military. Lookup "tyranny of the structureless".

Based on the frequency with which you compare parenting to hierarchical corporate or military structures, I sincerely hope you aren't a parent. It's intensely creepy and I would never want you around my kid.

Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#984

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you share a little more (anecdote) about what this means to you? > Was your dad mostly absent, over-working, or what? Or emotionally invisible?

My mom and bio dad were divorced when I was 11 months old, and I had basically zero contact with him until age 15 or 16. My mom re-married an alcoholic racist fuck who was on my very short list of people that I genuinely wished he were dead (he is now, so he's no longer on the list). He wasn't physically abusive, but he was certainly hella verbally abusive. In the nearly 40 years since re-establishing contact with my…

Brutal. Thank you to share your personal experience. It is hard to see now, but other young men will be reading this post in the future, and it will help. No one controls if you draw a sh-tty ticket in the lottery of life and have a bad family.

Real Question: If your step-father was an "alcoholic racist fuck", why did your mum marry him and stay with him? Please, please, don't read this as an attack on your mum! People enter and stay in relationships for a long list of reasons.

I was so lucky to have great parents, but my dad was mostly commuting during 8-18. I know he cared about me deeply, but his job and commute made it very difficult to spend a lot of time with me.

Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#985
post #860

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The effects onto men are more internal. Whereas effects onto women are normally more external. For example, a man could allow himself to be triggered into rage. And afterwards there will be no visible signs it happened within him. But his wife could've been around him, and now she has purple bruises. External signs are more easily measurable, and therefore reported more, therefore readers assume the most affected. If…

In the western world 75% of all suicides are men and over 90% of all homeless people are men.

Exactly. All that (internal) emotion gets pent-up and he doesn't know how to release it, so he takes one final act.

Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#986
post #593

OK, this is going to sound extremely controversial, but as a person who lived for many years in three different worlds: 1. The Western world (born/raised/educated in Canada) 2. The Arab world (lived for years in Jordan, have Muslim/Arab roots) 3. Eastern Europe (currently living in Ukraine for many years, now volunteering in the war) My observation is that 1. has an overly effeminate culture and harmfully stifles mas…

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Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#987

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could easily equate that statement to a “mother protecting and caring for her children” It’s pretty trite and meaningless to boil every dependent relationship into one of slavery. In the past, most women had to pick between marriage with an established man so she can have many kids starting young, versus working for herself and having no or few kids. It’s no surprise many women chose marriage.

Comparing it to children is not better. If anything, it's worse. Women are not children. They don't want to be protected, especially when they've chosen not to be. Women don't want to lose agency in the name of being cared for. Children don't have that option, because they're not adults. Adult women want to be treated as adults, and very much resent the implication that they need protection. Especially when that come…

And yet, I don't see many women turning down decades- or life-long spousal support when they walk away from a marriage (no-fault divorce remember) that they're no longer happy with. As a population, statistically, they certainly do want to be provided for at someone else's expense.

Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#988

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Regardless of the debate on how tough (or not) love should be, the absent fathers issue seems like something concrete and impactful that we should be trying to address. Where would we even start? The only circumstances where we could hope to do anything at all are those where it's either not a problem, or is still only a minor one... if daddy's doing 20 for murder or dealing at the kilo level, are we supposed to le…

It is strange that you immediately went the criminal route. I was thinking more about fathers who work too much, which is most in my world. They spend far less time with their children than their wives, maybe 5x to 10x. My father had a grueling commute as a child that was 90 minutes each way. What a waste. I hardly saw him during the week, then he was exhausted on the weekends. I cringe every time I hear senior (_ALW…

The start of this was the industrial revolution. Instead of the family and the home being the main workplace and source of income (farming, family trade, etc.) men went off to work, women went off to work, children went off to work. The family was atomized. Basically, corporations are the downfall of civilization.

Today, most people work long hours away from their family (both men and women) not to buy another ski trip but just to keep a roof over their heads and feed their kids. How can all of us find our way back to family business?

Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#989
post #407
post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It used to be done by promoting marriage and stigmatizing divorce. Now, that has obvious costs for the parents in many cases and certainly isn't always the right approach because of problems like domestic abuse. But the good of the children is part of why past societies have incentivized keeping parents together to care for their children and maybe we've gone a bit too far in the other direction, away from a happier…

> It used to be done by promoting marriage and stigmatizing divorce. Stigmatizing divorce does absolutely nothing to make fathers emotionally invested in their kids. If anything, it can make them resentful of their kids. The article was about how boys need emotional support from their father. A father who is present and married but still demands that his son "man up" and bottle up every problem is of no help.

There are plenty of men who have no gross moral fault, who are still excluded from their kids' lives by a wife who divorces him and gets custody. Stigmatizing divorce would help that. In divorces that occur in the US, close to 80% of the time it's by women; close to 90% when the woman is college-educated. The vast majority of divorces are not predicated on a gross moral fault by the man, but on unhappiness by the woman, growing apart, found a new guy, whatever. The woman in those cases is thus putting her own happiness above the wellbeing of her kids. So a stigmatization of divorce by society could work very well. It worked very well historically. Women are not more important than children. In fact, half of children are girls who also need fathers. And a woman-centric view of defining morality is just another demonstration of the problem of society's current disregard for men, boys, and the male experience.

Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#990
post #470

What's interesting is that I recently watched The Red Pill Documentary. I recall when it was released that the director, Cassie Jaye a self professed feminist was pilloried absolutely everywhere for giving a voice to Mens Rights Activists. The actual documentary is quite milquetoast. What it is, is her engaging with the ideas around how in some ways men are disadvantaged in modern society. It's fascinating to me that…

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